Supercomputing Conference Offers Up Smorgasbord of HPC Sessions

Nov 09, 2012 | The epic supercomputing event of the year, SC12, will be booting up next week in Salt Lake City, Utah, attracting HPC digerati, vendors, press, and analysts from around the world. And even though the DOE won't be there in full force this year, big crowds are still expected. This year's event should deliver plenty of fodder for those looking to keep up on the latest and greatest in the field.
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Cray Launches Cascade, Embraces Intel-Based Supercomputing

Nov 08, 2012 | AMD-loving Cray has launched the XC30 supercomputer, a product line that will be powered by Intel Xeon processors. The platform is based on the company's "Cascade" architecture, which is designed to bring a variety of processors and coprocessors under a common infrastructure. XC will become Cray's flagship computing platform as it phases out its XE and XK line over the next year or so.
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For DDN's Alex Bouzari, Big Data is the Democratization of HPC

Nov 06, 2012 | DataDirect Networks (DDN) is one of the few specialist storage vendors that has weathered the storm of industry consolidation. The company has managed to remain independent and focused on its HPC business, while others like BlueArc, Engenio, XtremIO, and Whamcloud got scooped up by larger companies with more diverse business goals. We recently spoke with DDN CEO Alex Bouzari to get his take on the industry churn and other trends that are reshaping the storage market.
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AMD Unveils 64-Bit ARM Strategy

Nov 01, 2012 | On Monday, AMD announced it is adding ARM-based Opterons to its portfolio, the first non-x86 server chips in the company's history. The new processors, due out in 2014, will use 64-bit ARM SoCs on top of its SeaMicro Freedom Fabric technology, and will be aimed at the datacenter and cloud space.
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Appro Heats Up HPC Portfolio with Warm Water Cooling

Oct 31, 2012 | Air-cooled servers may soon go the way of the single-core CPU. In high performance computing datacenters, the hottest new trend in energy efficiency is warm water cooling. IBM, Eurotech, and a handful of other vendors have paved the way with this technology and now Appro has entered the fray with its own solution.
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Titan Sets High Water Mark for GPU Supercomputing

Oct 29, 2012 | Oak Ridge National Laboratory has officially launched its much-anticipated Titan supercomputer, a Cray XK7 machine that will challenge IBM's Sequoia for petaflop supremacy. With Titan, ORNL gets a system that is 10 times as powerful as Jaguar, the lab's previous top system upon which the new machine is based. With a reported 27 peak petaflops, Titan now represents the most powerful number-cruncher in the world.
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Big Data Is HPC – Let's Embrace It

Oct 25, 2012 | Big data is all the rage these days. It is the subject of a recent Presidential Initiative, has its own news portal, and, in the guise of Watson, is a game show celebrity. Big data has also caused concern in some circles that it might sap interest and funding from the exascale computing initiative. So, is big data distinct from HPC – or is it just a new aspect of our evolving world of high-performance computing?
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Opinion: The Presidential Choice for Science and Technology

Oct 25, 2012 | With the looming US elections just days away, it's worth considering what effect the choice for President will have on federal science and technology policies for the next four years. While this is hardly a hot button issue in most voters' minds, these policies will have a much bigger impact on the quality of people's lives than the political soundbites currently being sprayed across the public airwaves.
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Sequoia Supercomputer Pumps Up Heart Research

Oct 24, 2012 | The world's fastest computer has created the fastest computer simulation of the human heart. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia supercomputer, a TOP500 chart topper, was built to handle top secret nuclear weapons simulations, but before it goes behind the classified curtain, it is generating sophisticated cardiac simulations.
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Promoting Hemispheric Advancement Through Collaborative Research

Oct 23, 2012 | The Organization of American States (OAS) has been called the UN of the Americas and it is involved in everything from food security to supercomputing. It is the prime political forum of the western hemisphere and the world's oldest regional organization.
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Penguin Joins Microserver ARMs Race

Oct 18, 2012 | Penguin Computing has launched its first ARM-based server platform. Known as the UDX1, the Penguin box is based on Calxeda's latest ARM server chip, and is aimed at cloud computing, Web hosting, and, especially, data analytics – UD stands for Ultimate Data. The move puts Penguin into the front ranks of computer makers who are testing the waters for the burgeoning microserver market.
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Designing HPC Systems: OPS Versus FLOPS

Oct 17, 2012 | As more "big data" applications make their way into HPC and commercial datacenters, system architects are reconsidering the fundamental designs of our computing machinery. In the first of a series of articles on HPC design, Convey chief scientist Steve Wallach talks about some of the defining architectural issues that span the new application landscape.
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OCF Supersizes HPC Service

Oct 16, 2012 | Systems integrator OCF just significantly expanded its pay-as-you-go supercomputing service, enCORE. What started out as a small pilot project has developed into a full-fledged, 8,000-core HPC service.
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NVIDIA Launches Fifth-Generation CUDA

Oct 15, 2012 | Chipmaker NVIDIA has released CUDA 5, its latest and greatest toolkit for GPU computing. This new version adds Kepler hardware support for the supercomputing crowd as well as extra functionality to boost developer productivity. CUDA 5 is being launched just a few months ahead of the new K20 GPU, which is scheduled to be available before the end of the year.
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The Future of Workload Management

Oct 12, 2012 | In this era of heterogeneous architectures and hybrid infrastructures, workload managers are necessarily becoming more and more sophisticated. Looking toward the future of workload management, there are three major trends: application insight, big data awareness, and HPC clouds. While inter-related, each has something important to contribute to the advancement of HPC.
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Chasing 1000X: The Future of Supercomputing Is Unbalanced

Oct 10, 2012 | The supercomputing community tends to think in 1000X increments – gigaflops, teraflops, petaflops, and soon, exaflops. It's all about hardware performance. But if we really want HPC that's a thousand times better than what came before, advances will have to come from sources beyond just servers and CPUs.
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Digital Gold Rush Powered by GPUs

Oct 09, 2012 | Coinlab, a Seattle-based startup that offers a unique monetization service, is considering a move into high performance computing. Today the company mines Bitcoins, digital currency to help online gamers make money. But they believe the same infrastructure that powers their operation can be parlayed into an HPC service business.
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Ahead by a Century: Utility Supercomputing Advances Stem Cell Research

Oct 08, 2012 | What if researchers could access virtually unlimited computing resources? That question was at the heart of Cycle Computing's BigScience Challenge. Now winner Victor Ruotti of the Morgridge Institute for Research has completed his utility supercomputing run, logging over a compute century on the Amazon cloud. The results will be used to build an indexing system for stem cells and their derivatives.
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Opinion: The Free HPC Fairytale

Oct 04, 2012 | I was more than a little perplexed at a recent article I ran across on Tech Radar that suggested high performance will be free, or nearly so, by 2020. You know, like how nuclear power was going to be "too cheap to meter" once the technology became ubiquitous.
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NSF-NCSA Study Probes Relationship between Industrial Applications and Underlying Science

Oct 03, 2012 | NSF and NCSA recently commissioned a study to see whether improvements in the science inside applications and other factors could help industrial HPC users. Merle Giles, director of NCSA's Private Sector Program, discusses the findings with HPCwire.
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Adapteva Launches Crowd-Source Funding for Its Floating Point Accelerator

Sep 28, 2012 | Chipmaker Adapteva is attempting to bypass the conventional venture capital funding route and collect money via a micro-investor platform known as Kickstarter. In the process, the company will open up its software and hardware design for its manycore Epiphany architecture, and deliver a parallel computing kit to anyone who can ante up $99.
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Big Data Engenders New Opportunities and Challenges on Wall Street

Sep 27, 2012 | One of technology’s most pervasive buzzwords echoed in the ears of attendees at this year’s one-day HPC on Wall Street conference in New York City, as panel after panel addressed the challenges and opportunities that big data presents. From the opening remarks regarding Wall Street’s traditional concern of low latency, delivered by Cisco CTO Paul Perez, to the multiple open-ended discussions that took place in concurrent panels, the “big data” problem was a much-discussed topic.
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Intel Fabrics Could Put the Squeeze On Mellanox

Sep 25, 2012 | It's been a good year for interconnect maker Mellanox. The company has been riding high in 2012, thanks in large part to its dominant position in the InfiniBand marketplace and the surge in FDR sales over the last several months. But with Intel now eyeing the lucrative high performance interconnect market, Mellanox may soon face a formidable challenge as InfiniBand kingpin.
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Half-Time in the Uber-Cloud

Sep 20, 2012 | Since its inception on June 28, the Uber-Cloud Experiment has attracted over 160 industry and research organizations and individuals from 22 countries. They all have one goal: to jointly explore the end-to-end process of remotely accessing technical computing resources sitting in HPC centers and in the cloud. With Round One of the experiment wrapping up, the organizers have generously provided a "half-time" report of the project.
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Dell Announces Servers That Will Power Stampede Supercomputer

Sep 19, 2012 | Dell has launched a new line of servers aimed at "hyperscale" server setups. The PowerEdge C8000 series encompasses a shared infrastructure chassis that can mix and match three different flavors of servers: vanilla x86 CPU, coprocessor-accelerated, and high density storage. The new offering will be the basis for Stampede, the 10-petaflop supercomputer being built this year at The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
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